Tags: internet

If you’re looking to stream the latest Harry Potter or Transformers movie tonight, Netflix is not the way to go.Tristan Louis was recently wondering where the latest hit movies where available to watch instantly… and his resulting research shows that Netflix is seriously lagging behind it’s competition – Amazon, iTunes and Vudu. In fact, as you can tell in the chart below by Flowing Data, Netflix only offers a sad 5 hit titles from 2011 out of the top 100… compare that to Amazon’s 45 titles, and the others just behind at 44.…

Three years ago on a computer not so far away… a plan was hatched to create a completely open source version of Star Wars: A New Hope, using the members of the internet. Envisioned by Casey Pugh, that vision became Star Wars Uncut, a crowdsourced version of the cult-classic film created by fans around the internet. Casey invited them (and you) to create 15 seconds of the original movie, to be combined with other 15 second tributes into a full length internet extravaganza. The resulting film – Star Wars Uncut: Directors Cut.…

What an exciting time we are living in! It’s one where the people of the planet, internet users everywhere, can rise up, make their voices heard and change the world! The legislative precipice we’ve been perched on lately, one that could make our free internet drastically more controlled, is quickly losing support. Fight for the Future, creators of the massively popular video below about SOPA and PIPA summed up yesterday’s internet blackout the best…

If you are a regular reader of Visual News, you may have noticed that today we participated in what is turning out to be the largest ever internet blackout in history… a protest symbolically showing what the internet could look like if the proposed PIPA or SOPA bills pass in the US Congress. The massive voluntary shutdown garnered attention just about everywhere and was participated in by behemoth sites the likes of Craigslist, Reddit and Wikipedia. So what does PIPA and SOPA mean for our shareable internet world, and why should you sign this online letter to congress? Below, Clay Shirky delivers a brilliant talk at the TED offices, challenging us to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share in the digital world.…

Anybeat is an online community, a public gathering place where you can interact with people from around your neighborhood or across the world. We don’t expect Anybeat to replace Facebook, Twitter, or any other service that you currently use. Instead, they hope that you will find it to be a casual place to gather and communicate with interesting people… a place where you can be yourself and don’t have to share your real identity. Check out the video below, then head here to check out this awesome community.…

With almost 500 million of its citizens now online, China is in the process of a massive social media revolution: in fact, a full quarter of all social network users in the world are now Chinese. How is this quick change shaping up for the many new computer users in the country and what are they able to see with the governments now famous “Great Firewall of China” in place? This graphic from G+, a community for professionals, academics and entrepreneurs to connect, explores the firewall, platforms Chinese are using to connect, what’s driving the quick adoption of social media, why it’s important to the republic and how the country’s digital consumption stacks up compared to the rest of us. It’s an exciting and quickly changing time in the social media world.…

“What the heck it electronic mail!?” Before the computer world was connecting every few seconds, the idea of email and online shopping was a concept that had to be communicated to customers. This roundup of vintage computer ads, explores some of the stranger ways companies like Apple and IBM brought us into the information age… be sure to see the last ad in this article, it’s a sight of things to come…

You don’t have to be that old to remember the days before Youtube, when streaming video was only 240 x 120 pixels and an exceptionally slow one frame a second. We’ve come a long way as this clip from a 1995 airing of MTV News shows. Featuring interviews from some still very relevant celebs like Sandra Bullock and Ozzy Osbourne, can you believe some people in 1995 still thought the internet was ‘just a fad’?…

From historic uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East to the Telecom mergers in the States, 2011 has already proven to be a pretty tumultuous year for the Internet… and we’ve still got 6 months to go.

Enter the new documentary #killswitch. The filmmakers at Akorn Entertainment aim to make the case that a free and open Internet is essential for democracy and they launched a kickstarter.com campaign to prove it. Topics of the film include: the special relationship between Internet Service Providers and the United States Government; media consolidation; Julian Assange and WikiLeaks; and the revolving door between governments and big media.…

Res Sapiens is a project authored by Pieke Bergmans and the Dutch design group LUSTlab. The Res Sapiens project merges the digital world with the physical, connecting them seamlessly and treating both as equals. It not only asks questions of us, but of itself as well. Res Sapiens refers to thinking physical objects (e.g. products and architecture) that surpass their visual representation and display their meaning, role and status in society.…